Best part of a great night for UK conservatives? The vile George Galloway gets tossed

British conservatives didn’t have a great night in Thursday’s general election; they had a spectacular night.

Political observers were dumbfounded when the exit polling indicated that Prime Minister David Cameron’s party was on track to form a majority government. The pre-election polling suggested that the best his party could hope for was the prospect of forming another coalition government with a severely truncated Liberal Democratic minority in order to shut out an alliance between Labor and the ascendant Scottish National Party. As it happens, the Tories will enjoy monopoly control over the British government until 2020.

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Outside of Scotland, progressivism took a real hit. This morning, a number of prominent liberal MPs find themselves unemployed. Perhaps none are more deserving of that status than the vile George Galloway. The former representative of the Bradford West constituency from the Orwellian-named Respect Party was one of the few former parliamentary representatives to lose their seat to a Labour candidate.

Of course, this notoriously gracious politician displaced his trademark magnanimity when he accepted his defeat. “I don’t begrudge the Labour members here their moment of celebration of course,” he said. “But there will be others who are already celebrating: the venal, the vile, the racists, and the Zionists will all be celebrating. The hyena can bounce on the lion’s grave, but it can never be a lion.”

Charming.

This is how this former MP who moonlights as a television host specializing in apologizing for the world’s most brutal regimes has comported himself for decades.

From even before the first Gulf War until the Iraqi dictator met his end on the gallows, Galloway became the foremost Western defender of Saddam Hussein. “Your excellency, Mr President, I greet you in the name of the many thousands of people in Britain who stood against the tide and opposed the war and aggression against Iraq and continue to oppose the war by economic means, which is aimed to strangle the life out of the great people of Iraq,” Galloway wrote to the Butcher of Baghdad ahead of their 1994 meeting. “I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. Sir, I salute your courage, your strength your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem.”

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After Hussein’s death, Galloway turned to defending other murderous autocratic regimes. “All the papers seem to imply that you get executed in Iran for being gay,” Galloway said in a 2008 television segment. “That’s not true.” Of course, Iran has been known to execute at least 4,000 suspected homosexuals since 1980 for either “active” or “passive” violation of anti-sodomy laws.

Galloway called Syria’s Bashar al-Assad a “breath of fresh air,” a grimly ironic turn of phrase considering that the Syrian dictator has been accused of using poison gas on civilian populations for the last three years with virtual impunity.

Galloway has insisted that he doesn’t recognize the state of Israel and even walked off a debate stage after he was informed that one of his interlocutors was an Israeli citizen.

“Russia has every right, indeed, obligation, to act in defense of its compatriots, its citizens, its economic and military assets which it has on the territory of the Ukraine by agreement and by treaty,” Galloway said of Moscow’s invasion and annexation of portions of Ukrainian territory in an RT interview for which he was well-compensated. Galloway added that it is always unwise for the West to “poke the bear with a stick.”

The former MP has even gone so far as to claim that ISIS’s many victims of persecution, beheading, displacement, and property destruction had been complicit in their own misfortune. “That population is quiescent because of Western policies and Western invasion,” he insisted of the territories in Iraq where ISIS operates, though he was curiously silent on ISIS’s Syrian incubator.

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Of course, no anti-Western apologist can avoid the temptation of blaming capitalism for the world’s ills and of dubiously comparing his political adversaries to Hitler. Galloway called George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and other Western leaders of the last decade “criminals,” a title they earned “through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known.”

“It has killed far more people than Adolf Hitler,” Galloway said of the system of free market economics in a 2005 Al Jazeera interview. “It has killed far more people than George Bush. The economic system which these people support, which leaves most of the people in the world hungry, and without clean water to drink.”

A horrible quisling apologist for virtually all of the world’s bad actors, George Galloway has made a career of serving as an insufferable mouthpiece to any tyrant who submits the highest bid. The former MP will now have to offer his services without having the moral authority associated with holding elected office. It’s a small karmic justice but a welcome one to learn that Bradford West constituents finally came to their senses.

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